Knight Ridder
WASHINGTON - The fans began chanting his name in the 50th minute, "Freddy, Freddy, Freddy," exhorting D.C. United coach Peter Nowak to insert the player they had all come to see.
The last time an RFK Stadium crowd got so charged up for a substitute wearing No. 9, Redskins quarterback Sonny Jurgensen was coming off the bench to relieve an injured Billy Kilmer.
From the moment 14-year-old Freddy Adu ran onto the field to a huge ovation, everyone in the building waited for something memorable to happen.
Little did.
Soccer's Boy King touched the ball about 10 times in 29 minutes, registering no shots and no Kodak moments in a 2-1 victory over the San Jose Earthquakes in a Major League Soccer opener.
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It wasn't much Adu about nothing. Then again, it wasn't Mario Lemieux scoring on his first shift or LeBron James collecting 25 points in his NBA debut in Sacramento.
Adu's performance was about what we should have expected from a kid playing against men for the first time with the world, including a national-television audience, watching.
He looked jittery, tentative and in his own words, "a step slow."
Adu is the league's highest-paid player at $500,000 a season and drawing comparisons to a young PelÇ. He also is the only athlete who needed a ride to the stadium from his Uncle Tony on Saturday morning.
"He is a kid with great potential and a great attitude, and I think he will emerge one day as a great player, but it's not going to happen right away," said U.S. national coach Bruce Arena, one of many soccer pooh-bahs in attendance.
"Freddy has all of about 30 minutes of professional experience. We have to be patient. We have to let him grow," he said.
Maybe that's not what ABC and ESPN, hoping to improve MLS' dismal ratings, want to hear. Maybe it's not what our rush-to-judgment society wants to hear.
But it's going to take time for the 5-foot-7, 148-pound forward to find his way. United teammate Bobby Convey, 20, who now plays for the national team, began his MLS career at 16.
He did not score his first goal until his second season. Earthquakes forward Landon Donovan, one of America's elite players, struggled through his first 10 games as a 19-year-old three seasons ago.
But neither one of those players generated the hype of Adu.
Fair or not, the expectations are staggering, nearly approaching LeBron level. Nike czar Phil Knight, who signed Adu to a $1 million contract, said he potentially could mean more to The Swoosh than Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods because soccer is a such an untapped U.S. market.
How surreal is this 14-year-old's life?
Adu received good-luck phone calls Saturday from quarterbacks Byron Leftwich, Eli Manning, Drew Henson and Olympic gold medalist Michael Johnson, all of whom have connections with him through IMG Academies or Nike.
Whatever happened to just getting a kiss from mom?
Adu got one of those, too. His mother, Emelia, was part of the sellout crowd of 24,603 fans.
